Say Hello to the New Atlassian

Who is Atlassian?

Atlassian is an Australian IT company that develops enterprise software, with its best-known products being its issue-tracking app, Jira, and team collaboration and wiki product, Confluence.

In December 2015, Atlassian went public and made their initial public offering (IPO) under the symbol TEAM, valuing them at $4.37 billion. In summary, they big.

What happened?

A facelift

It’s a nice sunny day in Sydney in mid-September of 2017, and Atlassian, after 15 years of consistency, has rebranded, changing their look and feel for a brighter and funner one, compared to the dreary previous look.It’s a hell of a lot simpler and, as they show in the above video, it’s going to be used with a lot more creativity and flair in mind—it’s flexible in a sense that they can use it in a lot more ways than before, with a lot more colours than before.

The blues they’re using now work super-well with the logos on a white background, whereas the white logos on their new champion, brand colour blue can go both ways: some can see it as a bold, daring step which is quite attractive, while others can see it as off-putting and not very user-friendly.

What’s it all mean?

Symbolism

In his announcement blog, Atlassian Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes, mentions that the branding change reflects their newly-shifted focus on the concept of teamwork. He continues to explain that their previous logo depicted the sky-holding Greek titan Atlas and symbolised legendary service and support. But, while it has become renown, they’re shifting their focus on the concept of teamwork—why focus on something you’ve already done right, right?

The new logo contains more symbolism than meets the eye, as can be interpreted as:

Two people high-fiving

A mountain to scale

The letter “A” (seen as two pillars reinforcing each other)

Product logos

Atlassian has created and acquired many products in their adventure so far, and they all seemed to have a similar art style, but something always felt off about their consistency. Well, needless to say, this was addressed with Atlassian’s very own “identity system”, which is a pretty cool term for a consistent logo-look for 14+ products, to fit them under one brand.

The result is a set of unique marks that “still feel very related to each other”. Whereas, I also see a new set of “unknown” Pokémon.

Typeface

To add a cherry on top, Atlassian will be using their own custom-made typeface called Charlie Sans, specifically designed to balance legibility with personality–that’s probably the best way to describe it. Otherwise, I’d say, out of purely-constructive criticism, that there isn’t much difference between itself and any of the other staple fonts; i.e. Arial, Verdana, etc. Then again, I’m not a professional designer.

It doesn’t look as distinct as their previous typeface, but, to be fair, it does look very slick next to the new product logos.